Data collected by NEON will enable scientists to--for the first time--measure the causes and long-term impacts of climate change, invasive species and land use changes throughout the U.S. NEON will also produce educational/outreach resources based on NEON data.

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NEON is an ecological sensing instrument. It's infrastructure includes 106 nationwide data collection locations that were strategically selected to represent the full diversity of U.S. ecosystems. Additional data collection locations will be added to represent extreme conditions, such as droughts, fires and floods.

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NEON at a Glance: A quick video overview of NEON

Credit: National Science Foundation

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)--which is currently under construction and is partially operational--will be a nationwide, multidisciplinary infrastructure for collecting standardized ecological data throughout the U.S. It will be the first observatory to listen to the pulse of a continental ecosystem for multiple decades.

Resulting ecological data, which will be made publicly available, will enable scientists to quickly produce snapshots of the state of the environment across the U.S., and generate the first apples-to-apples comparisons of ecosystem health throughout the U.S. over multiple decades.

In this webcast, NEON is discussed by 1) Elizabeth Blood, the NSF program director for NEON; 2) Dave Tazik, NEON's director of biology; and 3) Tom Kampe, NEON's assistant director for remote sensing.